Distributed process groups in the V Kernel

Abstract

The V kernel supports an abstraction of processes, with operations for interprocess communication, process management, and memory management. This abstraction is used as a software base for constructing distributed systems. As a distributed kernel, the V kernel makes intermachine boundaries largely transparent.In this environment of many cooperating processes on different machines, there are many logical groups of processes. Examples include the group of tile servers, a group of processes executing a particular job, and a group of processes executing a distributed parallel computation.In this paper we describe the extension of the V kernel to support process groups. Operations on groups include group interprocess communication, which provides an application-level abstraction of network multicast. Aspects of the implementation and performance, and initial experience with applications are discussed.

Construction Methodologies for Improving Distributed System Security - The Horus and Ensemble Projects

“…During a period from 1983-1985, Cheriton and Zwaenapoel at Stanford extended the basic IP communication suite to support what they called distributed process groups [CZ85]. They used these groups in support of application-initiated broadcast, and proposed a number of group-based services which used broadcast to provide some form of parallelism or accelerated response.…”

Fault-Tolerant Key Distribution (Preliminary Version)

“…The architecture was developed in an effort to integrate security into Isis, a system for building fault-tolerant applications [BJ87,BSS91], although in principle it could be applied in other group-oriented systems such as V [CZ85] and Amoeba [KT91]. In this section, we briefly outline the architecture as it was designed and implemented for Isis, 3 and then focus on the roles played by the authentication and time services.…”

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“…In the V system [9], groups are identified with a group identifier. If two processes concurrently broadcast two messages, A and B, respectively, some of the members may receive A first and others may receive B first.…”